


The Only Light

by Juxtaposie



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Blood, Crying, Drug Use, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Self-Harm, but it's really mild, like seriously all the crying, so much crying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-18 00:50:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11280294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juxtaposie/pseuds/Juxtaposie
Summary: "It reminds him of being a child, hiding in the bedroom and holding baby Jellybean; his parents screaming at each other, and no matter what he does he can’t make JB stop crying. He feels helpless, and he hates it, but he doesn’t know what to do to make Betty slow down. Like this, she’s a tightly coiled spring, and when she snaps - which she will- the only person she’s going to hurt is herself."





	The Only Light

**Author's Note:**

> Because I'm a sucker for hurt/comfort, that's why. Title from Florence + The Machine's _Only If For A Night_.

He’s in FP’s trailer, struggling through his calculus homework - he promised Betty he wouldn’t start slacking, despite his rampant case of senioritis - when his phone starts buzzing. It’s the girl herself, and because she never calls if she can text, he answers immediately

“Where are you?” she demands before he can say hello. 

“Sunnyside,” he answers. There’s a long pause, and for one panicked, irrational moment he worries this is it; she’s come to her senses, she’s dumping him, she’s too good for him, too good for anybody in this shithole town, and she’s finally realized-

But then there’s a sniffle on the other end, and his heart seizes in his chest in the most beautifully painful way. He remembers the emotion in her voice the last time she told him she loved him, just the night before on the phone, and all his old insecurities go quiet. 

“Betts,” he says gently, standing in a vain attempt to alleviate the sudden tension in his limbs. “Whats wrong? What happened?”

“Can I come over?” she asks instead, voice watery. 

“Of course,” he says. He wants to tell her to be careful - he’s seen how she drives when she’s upset - but the line goes dead.

Dropping the phone back on the table, he runs a hand over his face and looks around the living room. It’s strewn with clothes and empty soda cans, but he’s confident he can clean it up before she arrives. Living with FP and his drunken temper, Jughead had become an expert in the art of the quick tidy-up. It turned out that rushing around picking up trash because your girlfriend was coming over was a lot more fun than wondering if your drunk father would notice you’d shoved all the dirty laundry into the back of the closet. 

(FP never had.)

It’s less than ten minutes before he hears tires turning on the gravel outside. He goes to open the door for her, but it’s already unlocked and she breezes in, marching right past him and into the kitchen. She throws a plastic bag down on the counter, her face wet. An icy hand grips his heart when he realizes she’s still crying, silently, her eyes bright and glassy.

“Betty,” he says, voice soft. She doesn’t look at him, and when he moves to embrace her she turns away from him and begins to rifle through the kitchen cabinets. 

So instead of pushing it, he leans back against the opposite wall, crossing his arms, and asks, “Alice?” His stomach drops at the way she smiles, all twisted and bitter. 

“Yes,” she says, the word dripping with venom. “ _Alice_.” She pulls a chipped glass down, and fills it with water. “Alice, who can’t talk to Polly without - without criticising her mothering.” She empties the pharmacy bag onto the countertop. Three bottles and a small square plastic package fall out. “Alice, who told my sister to be careful how she feeds her infant daughter because Lord knows the worst thing a baby girl could be is fat.” One by one she lines the bottles up on the counter’s edge, labels facing outward, nice and neat. “Alice, who won’t _shut the fuck up_ about how I’m the good daughter, the only thing she got right, the last hope for the Cooper family to regain any respectability.” 

“Hey,” he says, taking a step toward her, “It’s all right.”

“It’s not,” she counters, voice rising. “It’s not okay, because look what else Alice has done-” she makes a sweeping gesture toward the counter with one hand, and then picks up the plastic package, tearing into it, “-without asking me or - or caring what I- what I want or think. Did you know I’ve been on birth control since the day after she found out about us?”

He shakes his head mutely at this. He’d known she was on it, because they’d talked about being safe, but she’d never said anything else about it and he hadn’t thought to ask. He can only watch as she pushes one of the tiny pills out of its bubble. “Well I have,” she says, before popping it into her mouth and snatching up the water. The glass slams down onto the counter when she’s done with it, and she picks up the first pill bottle. “But hormones make you fat. And emotional. And when you’re emotional you can’t focus on college applications. So there’s Adderall. And it’s basically speed so there’s the added bonus of weight loss.” 

She’s unscrewing the cap before he can stop her, and he’ll never know how her hands are so steady while the rest of her shakes like a leaf. She swallows this one dry in what seems to be, to him, a much too practiced motion. It reminds him of his dad prying off a bottle cap on the edge of the counter when he’s too drunk to remember where he left the bottle opener. Something nasty curls violently in the pit of his stomach.

“Betty,” he tries again, stepping up against her and looping his arms around her waist. He holds her loosely, not wanting her to feel caged, so it’s easy for her to shake him off and turn back to the counter, but he doesn’t move away. The second bottle is in her hands and the lid is off before he can blink. 

“Alprazolam,” she says, fishing a tiny white pill out. “Because being wired makes you jittery and sometimes just a little paranoid, and you don’t want to seem too eager because that makes you look desperate and needy.”

She doesn’t bother with water for this one either.

Jughead doesn’t move to stop her when she grabs the third pill bottle and, finally, the glass. She tucks the bottle into her jacket pocket, and pushes past him into the living room, where she begins to pace. He follows her on autopilot, blood thundering in his ears. He’s only seen her like this a few times, and every time it scares him more and more. It reminds him of being a child, hiding in the bedroom and holding baby Jellybean; his parents screaming at each other, and no matter what he does he can’t make JB stop crying. He feels helpless, and he hates it, but he doesn’t know what to do to make Betty slow down. Like this, she’s a tightly coiled spring, and when she snaps - which she will- the only person she’s going to hurt is herself. Already her knuckles are white around the glass in her hand, the other a tight fist by her side. He’s never seen her this bad.

“The last hope for the Cooper family,” she breathes, “and here I am, wasting the best years of my life with a Jones, with the son of a convicted felon, the weirdo loner outcast.” The words tumble from her lips like she can’t control them, and he knows it’s not her, never her, but every single one feels like a punch in the gut, and his teeth squeak as his jaw tightens. This is going to be bad, and he shifts all his own anger and self-loathing into hatred for Alice Cooper. 

He cuts her off before she can open her mouth again. “Stop” he pleads, trying to sound calm, soothing. Trying to make it sound more like a comfort and less like a warning.”Stop, Betty. That’s not you. That’s your mother talking.”

The glass creaks in her hand, or maybe he imagines it, and she laughs, an edge of hysteria creeping in even as her voice goes curiously flat. “We’ve been dating almost three years and she still doesn’t know you. She doesn’t _want_ to know you. She’s convinced you’re going to knock me up and drag me back to the trailer park and then we’ll have five kids by the time I’m twenty-seven and you’ll be a drunk just like your dad.”

It hurts, to know her mother has jumped on one of his deepest fears - but then again, it’s not exactly a secret. Addiction runs in families, after all. What hurts even more is knowing that Betty had to stand there and listen to it. She stops pacing, breathing fast and shallow, and this time when he goes to her she let’s him get close enough to put a hand on her shoulder, though he moves it almost immediately to cup the side of neck. His other hand closes over her fist, and it’s like holding a rock. There’s something warm and sticky gathering between her fingers, and his heart breaks a little. 

“Do you know the worst part?” she asks, her face inches from his own. 

He shakes his head, “No, Betts, don’t, please.”

“The worst part,” she says with a strange little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “The worst part is that I was so mad while I was driving over here, I thought-”

“You need to breathe, Elizabeth. Breathe and let go.”

“- that what if I just proved her right? I could drop out, we could move in together, stop using birth control.” Betty opens her fist so she can thread their fingers together. He can feel blood pressing into his palm, and she grips him so tightly it hurts but she’s not really paying attention. “We could just be all those terrible things she thinks we are and then maybe - maybe she’d leave us alone.”

Jughead doesn’t know what to do, but he can’t listen to her talk like this anymore, so he presses his mouth to hers. She doesn’t kiss him back, but she draws a long, deep breath in through her nose, and it’s something. He doesn’t linger, and when he pulls back, Betty looks up at him and the hurt hiding behind her eyes in overwhelming. 

Tears start to spill again when she draws a deep, shaking breathe. “Juggie, I-”

In her other hand, the glass shatters. 

The only noise Betty makes is a sharp inhale. There’s a long moment where time seems to stop, but it’s broken when the first drop of blood wells out under one of the pieces of glass buried in her hand and rolls down the side of her palm to drip onto the carpet. Before he can even process what he’s doing, he unzips his hoodie and bunches it under her hand to catch the blood. 

“Shit,” he breathes. It’s hard to tell how bad it is - what’s actually cut her, and what’s just detritus, all of it mingling with what he has to remind himself isn’t actually a concerning amount of blood. Yet. “Come on.” He pulls gently on her wrist to lead her into the kitchen. She’s mouthing something, face pale and eyes a little wild, but he can’t make it out and she doesn’t try to pull away. 

The pill bottles are all still there, and Betty starts crying in earnest when she sees them; not the quiet, controlled crying of someone trying (and failing) to keep themselves in check, but deep, body-wracking sobs that shake her shoulders. He wants to hold her, but he also wants to bandage her hands so they’ll stop bleeding everywhere, so he makes a compromise. The bottles go into the knife drawer, out of sight. He lets the sink run until the water is nice and cold, then maneuvers Betty up to it, moving behind her, pushing the sleeves of her jacket up her arms and guiding her hands under the stream of water. 

He lets her cry, his right arm around her shoulders, left hand cupped under hers. Pink water splashes down the drain, washing the blood off both their hands, and he presses his lips against her cold forehead, whispering, “Shh I’ve got you, I love you, I’m here, I’m here,” and slowly but surely her cries quiet into hiccups and her breathing evens out. It’s only then that he realizes he’s the one who’s still shaking. Betty is still as a stone. 

“I’m sorry,” she says finally, voice low. “About the glass, I mean. I can clean it up.”

“Jesus, Betty.” He can’t keep the bitterness out of his laughter. Of course she’s worrying about the cup. 

She’s going for nonchalant when she says, “I can replace it too. I know you don’t have ma-”

“Forget about the glass,” he cuts in, more harshly than he means to. “I don’t give a fuck about the glass.”

Her chin drops onto the arm he still has curled around her shoulders - she’s looking at the counter, and her voice is small when she’s says, “Okay. Sorry.”

He wants to kick himself. He wants to kick Alice Cooper. 

“Hey,” he says softly, leaning around to look her in the eye. “I don’t care about the glass. I care about _you_.”

She nods, and even though she’s not smiling something softens the hurt in her eyes. He knows her - deeply, profoundly, intimately - and he knows that look: trust. 

Kissing the downturned corner of her mouth, he pulls away. “I’m gonna look for the first-aid kit. Pretty sure my mom didn’t snatch it in her mad-dash to get away from my dad.” He waits for her to nod again before going into the trailer’s (one, tiny) bathroom. The first-aid kit is exactly where he remembers it being - shoved into the back of the built-in cabinets, behind a stack of old towels.

When he comes back into the kitchen, Betty has dragged the trashcan over to the sink and she’s working valiantly at pulling the glass out of her palm. He wants to help her, but he’s not sure how, so he settles for digging supplies out of the kit: tweezers, antibiotic ointment, non-stick bandages, and gauze. They argue briefly about going to the hospital; there’s only one cut that’s really bad, and it won’t stop bleeding no matter how many paper towels she presses over it. He wants her to go, and only stops insisting when she’s close to tears again, because the ER will call her mom, and she absolutely cannot see her mom right now. He leaves it alone. 

It isn’t until he’s wrapping gauze around a non-stick bandage on the cut in her left palm (that still hasn’t stopped bleeding), that he says the most pressing thing on his mind. He tries to make it sound casual, which somehow just makes him seem more concerned. “So, uh, should I be worried about you taking all those pills together?”

Betty laughs a little, which only helps because there’s actual humor in it. “No.”

When Jughead looks up from his work, eyebrows raised, she meets his gaze with confidence. It’s shaky, but sincere. “I might be a little weird,” she says when he secures the gauze with a piece of medical tape. “But I’ll be okay.”

She doesn’t stop him when he reaches out to grab the third pill bottle out of her pocket. It’s Ambien.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she offers, watching as he peels a band-aid out of its package for the tiny cuts in her right hand. “She’s worried it’s affecting my concentration.”

Jughead doesn’t have anything to say to that nonsense that’s not going to upset her, so he keeps his peace. Lack of sleep is almost definitely affecting her concentration, but his gut tells him that addictive sleep medication isn’t the answer - at least not as a first resort. Instead, he leans down to lay a gentle kiss in each of her palms, careful not to disturb the dressings, and then tugs her to her feet and leads her back out into the living room. Betty makes a move towards the shards still laying in the carpet, but he pushes her past the mess, to the couch. When she’s settled, he brings his laptop to the coffee table, opens _Pillow Talk_ in the media player, and then does the best he can at cleaning up the remaining glass. He’ll borrow a vacuum from one of the neighbors tomorrow. When he’s done, he brings her a plastic cup of water, and then they lay down on the couch together and watch Doris Day and Rock Hudson dance adorably around each other in relative silence. 

The movie ends, and he’s convinced Betty’s asleep until she shifts around to face him, slinging an arm across his waist and burying her face in his neck. “I forgot to refill my meds,” she says while she slides one of her legs between both of his. “She wouldn’t let it go.”

That she’s offering the information at all means she wants to talk, but he’s not sure what to say, so he settles for rubbing her back, hand running gently across her skin underneath her t-shirt. 

“She just- she wouldn’t let it go,” she continues with a tremor in her voice. “I only missed two days. I haven’t even seen you all week. We haven’t…” She blows out a frustrated breath. 

His heart sinks as Alice’s implications click. Betty’s other hand, sandwiched between them, grabs the front of his shirt like a vice. “I love you,” she says, and he thinks she might start crying again. “You shouldn’t have to deal with this. I shouldn’t have come ov-”

He can’t stop the way his arms tighten around her (uncomfortably hard, bordering on painful) and he pulls back just far enough to kiss her. It’s short, and harsh, meant to stop the vile stream of words flowing out of her, just like his earlier kiss in the same room, before she’d hurt herself. He’s out of his depth, and he’s angry and scared. More than that, he knows that whatever he’s feeling is probably only a fraction of what Betty’s been through today, and she doesn’t deserve any of it.

When he pulls back, both their faces are wet. He cups her chin, and makes her look at him before he says, “I want to deal with this. It’s - it’s okay to let me.”

It’s not the first time he’s said the words, and he knows it won’t be the last, but Betty just gives him a watery smile and nods before tucking her face back against his neck. Her breath is warm and - after a few minutes - steady. 

Eventually they fall asleep. He has unsettling dreams.

 

 

When he wakes it’s because Betty has finally answered her phone, which was set on vibrate and had been buzzing constantly for anywhere from a few hours to the last fifteen minutes - he’s not sure; sleep is weird that way. She snatches it up off the coffee table, jumping to her feet and jarring the both of them fully awake. When she answers it, her voice is calm but brittle. “I’m not coming home tonight,” she says in one long breath. “Stop calling.” 

Then she turns the phone off and flings it across the room where it smacks against the wood laminate before landing on the loveseat. He sits up, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, and says “Betts.”

Her hands, which had begun to curl into fists, unclench, and all the tension drains out of her body. When she turns back to look at him, biting her lip, the only thing in her eyes is exhaustion. “Is it okay if I-”

“Yeah,” Jughead says, standing so fast he barks his shins against the coffee table. “Yeah, of course.”

“Thanks,” Betty says softly, before taking a deep breath and letting it out as a long, tired sigh. She’s sort of a mess now - her hair is falling out of its ponytail, most of her mascara is under her eyes, and all her lipstick has come off - and it strikes him, not for the first time, how he might be the only person who gets to see her like this; the only person she _lets_ see her like this. The thought warms his heart even as it ties his stomach in knots. Betty is the best person he knows. She deserves so much more than what’s been handed to her. 

He doesn’t ask her what she’s going to do about clothes, or her backpack, but knowing Betty, she’s already got it figured out. Instead, he moves on to a much more pleasant (and neutral) subject: food. She laughs a little when he offers to make them both dinner, protesting gently. 

“It’s not going to be fancy,” he says with his head in the fridge. There isn’t much to eat. He’d aged out of the foster system, but the Tellers still fed him dinner almost every night, and Southside High had a decent free lunch program. Still, he’d made it a point to try and keep at least something decent in the trailer. “How about grilled cheese and tomato soup?”

“Classic comfort food,” Betty says from her place at the kitchen table. She’s taken off her jacket, and let her hair down, and she looks a little more at ease, her injured hands cupped gently around her plastic cup. She offers to cook for the third time. 

“This is barely cooking,” he counters, stirring the soup on the stove. “Why don’t you go pick out something to watch while we eat?”

“I like watching _you_ ,” she says. He glances back at her, and she meets his gaze with confidence despite the blush on her still-pale face. He can feel the tips of his ears beginning to burn when he turns back to the stove, struck suddenly by how very _domestic_ the whole scene is. 

Behind him, Betty giggles. “You’re neck is the color of a fire truck.”

“Keep talking, Cooper, and I’ll burn your grilled cheese.”

 

 

They sit for awhile after they’re done eating, watching _Parks and Rec_ on Jughead’s laptop. Betty is tucked under his arm, her legs folded beside her on the couch, her left hand laying on his thigh, palm up. The bandage is still alarmingly red, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. It’s only a little after nine. 

“Thanks, Juggie,” she says into the silence between episodes. She turns her face into his shoulder and takes a deep breath. “For dinner, and letting me stay, and… being you.”

He puts his other arm around her, and turns so that he’s laying back against the couch arm, pulling her down against him. “I wasn’t going to let you sleep in your car.”

“Or go back to my mom?” she asks, carding her fingers through the hair that’s fallen in his face.

“Definitely wasn’t too crazy about that either,” he says before kissing her. He means for it to be short, and soft, but then Betty’s moving to straddle his hips, and wriggling an arm underneath his shoulders to haul herself closer against him. It doesn’t move beyond that - neither of them are in the headspace for sex - but they spend the next half hour ignoring the show, kissing lazily and enjoying being close to each other. Her foot is twitching, beating a steady drum against his calf, but she seems relaxed.

“I feel gross,” she says eventually. 

His face is buried in her neck, lips travelling lazily along the column of her throat, but he pulls back. He can feel the frown on his face when he says, “You’re not gross.”

“No, I’m gross,” she says dryly. “I’ve been crying on and off for the last five hours. I’m pretty sure there’s still blood under my fingernails. I’m gross.”

Jughead cups her face in both hands, and kisses the apples of her cheeks. “I agree that some of those things are true. Still object to the gross.”

“I need a shower,” she says, smiling as she leans in to brush her lips against his temple. 

“It just so happens I have a shower,” he says gently against the corner of her mouth, but Betty sits up before he can kiss her again. She looks embarrassed

“I, um-” she’s twisting the tips of her fingers together in the space of her own pause. He puts his hands on her hips, thumbs circling the bare skin between her jeans and her t-shirt, and she says, “I’m not sure I can do it on my own, Jug.” 

His arms slide around her as he sits up. Betty watches him from beneath her eyelashes, and it only takes a few seconds for him to realize what she’s not asking. His face heats up a little when he says, “I can help you.”

She nods, and her smile is small but sincere. They move into the bathroom. 

They’re both laughing when he peels their shirts off and helps her shimmy out of her jeans. Her socks seem a little more intimate somehow, and he turns the water on before he helps her out of her bra and underwear. He can tell she’s nervous in a new way - the same way he is. They’ve showered together before, but it’s always been foreplay, or after-care. It’s never just been a shower. There’s a long, weird moment where they’re both standing in the tiny stall, watching each other, before he turns her, gently, to face to shower spray. She lifts her face to the water, but keeps her hands clear, and directs him through her usual bathing routine. They’re both blushing by the end of it, and when he wraps her up in an old towel she’s smiling, though it looks like she might cry again. 

He’s able to stave it off with small talk. He helps her into one of his old shirts and a borrowed pair of boxers, before dressing himself similarly. They change the bandage on her left hand and then settle down into the bed. Betty presses herself into his side, hand roaming gently over his stomach and chest beneath his worn t-shirt. She’s still a little jittery, but he chalks it up to the medication, and after a few minutes she gets up to fetch his laptop. 

“Can you sleep if I’m watching something?” she asks when she settles back down beside him. She’s already browsing through Netflix, glancing between him and the screen, and he’s drowsy, lulled by the shower and her warmth, so he nods. He makes her promise that she’ll wake him if she needs anything. His last waking memory is of her leaning over him, hands in his hair while she kisses his face.

“I love you,” she says. “Thank you. I love you.”

Then he’s asleep.


End file.
